


One method of helping

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: AU, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff and Feels, Rebelcaptain Valentine, Romance, also minor appearance by Bodhi Rook, rcvalentine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 09:56:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9716423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: OrThey don’t call them Valentines in a galaxy far, far away.  But it’s just Jyn’s luck to get one.(Sometimes people need a helping hand, even if it's only to get them to seduce one another).





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is my rebelcaptainnetwork valentine, for tumblr user theeyeofthefuckingtiger. The prompt was "Are you trying to seduce me?" and I confess I've interpreted it a tad loosely; but this was what came. I hope you like it!

The first time, it’s just a scrap of flimsy-paper with a coloured drawing on, a scribbled bunch of red flowers with green leaves, tied with a blue pencil curlicue.  Jyn has no idea how it got into her locker, but she hasn’t the heart to throw it away.  It reminds her too much of her own childish drawings, at six, at seven, at eight, and then no more.  Someone on Hoth is probably looking for their kid’s picture right now and hoping it hasn’t been trashed.

She stuffs it under her running shoes and tells herself to remember to ask if anyone’s lost a kid’s drawing.  Then forgets, caught up in the rhythm and energy of her pre-dawn workout, and the busy activity of her day.

The next morning, when she arrives at the gymnasium and opens her locker to get changed, it’s still there, and now it has a companion.  A second piece of flimsy, larger than the first, has been pushed under the locker door.  On this one, the drawing is of a single flower, red like the ones in the bouquet; and beneath it there’s writing:

The way you wear your scarf

The way you’re always clean

The way you run so free

In your kick-ass boots

You always look so fine, and

You do something to me.

She stands staring at the note in a mixture of irritation and bewilderment.  It’s a waste of resources, to use real flimsy-paper for something like this.  Granted, these are only small pieces, but still…  The drawings are infantile and the poem isn’t much better.

Someone at Echo Base is teasing her.  As if life here weren’t miserable enough, with the cold and the damp and the feeling of not-fitting-in, someone is amusing themselves at her expense.   It can’t be serious, after all.  They’re in the middle of a war.  No-one sends love notes in a war.

If it is serious, that’s almost worse.  Oh, krif, perhaps it **is** serious.  Just her luck if so.

She re-reads the poem and snorts.  “The way you’re always clean”; not much of a compliment.  She couldn’t even have someone get a crush on her who knew how to do it right.  Just her luck, indeed.

It’s not that Jyn is cynical about love.  She wishes she were.  Over the years she’s seen just enough of what people will do for love to know it is the most powerful, and the most dangerous, force in the galaxy.  So maybe she should be grateful for her secret admirer being so inept.  Or her joker, whichever they turn out to be.  Whether humourist or fan, it’s hard to imagine the author of this doggerel being someone who will throw their life on the fire.  So she’s probably safe.

She starts to screw the note up, and then feels sorry for the writer, and stuffs it in the bottom of the locker instead.  But for the rest of the day she wonders, and looks around her, scanning faces, searching eyes.  Someone, somewhere among her platoon, among her comrades, somewhere in this ice-hell she’s stuck in; someone, surely, will look away in embarrassment, sooner or later.

But no-one does.

The next day, there’s another note.  She looks left and right, hoping to catch someone watching, before steeling herself and unfolding it.  Another flower drawing, and another poem.

You are all sea-colours, all

Rosewood and rose, colours of

The rising sun; such warmth

In the light, shining

From you; and I

A shadow at your feet.

Well, that at least isn’t quite such bad poetry, though the images make her oddly uncomfortable.  Too much rising sun and sea; she shivers, remembering a sea with a sun that was no sun, rising within it. 

Reminds herself the writer can’t possibly guess the associations she’ll make with those words. 

Then wonders too if the last line was intended to sound quite so self-abasing.  Maybe her secret admirer only meant to say that he or she is as ever-present as a shadow…

That would narrow it down to – most of her platoon.

Damn it, it’s so unfair!  For the first time in years her life has something approaching stability.  She has a role in life, a group of friends.  She has things she can try to fit in with, instead of living behind a façade of not caring about her solitude and lack of any purpose beyond mere survival.  For once a relationship could have been possible; a chance of pleasure instead of a foolhardy risk.  Happiness is a real option, for someone who has goals and hopes, and a place she can call home.  If only…

A place to call home.  She shivers again suddenly, and it’s not from the poem, or the chilly air.  There’s a husky voice in her mind, dark-toned and gentle, a voice that said the words she’d longed for and never dreamed of one day hearing; “Welcome home.”  But that would be too much to hope for.  Captain Cassian Andor is a man wholly given to the cause.  He’s kept away from her for a year, ever since Scarif, as if those insane few days had never happened; as if he’d never said “Welcome home” to her at all, or never expected her to think he meant it.  As if the memory of holding her in his arms on that beach in the face of imminent death was the most embarrassing of his life. 

She means nothing to him, not now they have the rest of the war to fight.  He’ll never see her as more than a brave comrade who needed emotional support on a crucial mission, when there was only him around to give it.

Just her luck, then, to have fallen for him.  And just her luck to have had someone fall for her who was too shy to declare themselves and too clumsy to do more than call her a girl of sunshine and roses.  It’s sweet; but it’s not Jyn.  She’s a woman of dust and blood and need, not blossom, not springtime and dawn-time.  Not Jyn.

It’s a special day today, the first anniversary of the Scarif Assault.  Straight after that early gym session, the rest of her morning is taken up with last-minute preparations for the parade and troop review, and then the review itself.  It’s only afterwards, aching with marching and standing to attention, that she has time, before the air support fly-past begins, to slip away to the new memorial on the Wall of Honour, and stand with her feet in flowers, to trace the names of the friends who did not come back.

Her fingers linger, touching the carved letters; _Chirrut Îmwe, Baze Malbus_. 

She imagines Chirrut smiling.  How interested he would have been by her latest frustration.  He’d probably have found it far more worth discussing than a troop review in his memory.

And she’s pretty sure he would have told her to give love a chance, and be unafraid.

She isn’t afraid, she tells herself crossly.  Just irritated and confused.  Who knows, her secret admirer might even be someone she gets on with.  If she just knew who it damned well was then she could give love a damned chance!  Even though it isn’t going to be the man she really wants.  She isn’t inhuman, she wouldn’t object to some intimate company.  It would be fun.  It’s been a long time to be sleeping in a cold bed, and blazing blasts but Hoth is cold!  Yes, so it wouldn’t be Cassian warming her; but it could still be fun.

She isn’t afraid at all.

But the truth is, she doesn’t want a bed-warmer.  What she wants is not to have dreamed the things she now knows were imaginary; the companionship and the friendship, the trust, the heart-stopping sense of someone understanding her without her needing to speak.  The feeling he would always come back for her when no-one ever had.  The feeling she’d never be alone again.  She wants it to have been true that he was starting to feel the same.  And it wasn’t.  Can’t have been.  She wants Cassian, and she isn’t going to get him.

She leaps like a scared Ewok as a hand comes down gently on her shoulder.  Spins round, reaching instinctively for the baton at her hip.  And is staring into the deep brown eyes of Cassian Andor.

“Sir!”  Her voice is a squawk.  “You made me jump!”

He raises an eyebrow.  “Sergeant.”  His hand stays on her shoulder, firm and steady.  As if he wants to keep touching her.  That can’t be; but the sense of connection, today of all days, is unnerving.  His touch evokes memories she has wanted to put behind her for so long.  A feeling of warmth, a security, at the gentleness holding her.  Holding her as he did a year ago, so tenderly yet with all his strength. 

She inhales sharply.  Looking up at him, so close suddenly, for a horrible moment she wants to cry.  Jyn never cries.  Has not cried once since that day.  Since she stood on the citadel tower at Scarif and he came back to her.  She shed tears on the tower, and on the beach, that she would have chained and bound and murdered, forever crushed, without him. 

His eyes slip past her face to rest on the memorial, on the two names engraved there side by side in death as in life.  A tiny smile lifts the corners of his mouth.

“Chirrut and Baze,” he says softly.  “I’m very glad to have known them, glad and proud.  I wish they could have seen today.”

Jyn wonders whether to make the joke Chirrut would have made, and decided against it.  She’s too keyed up, standing here, caught out; and his hand is still touching her, his warm eyes returning to hers.

He steps closer.  Says huskily “There’s something I have to ask you.”

She has no idea what it can be; and he’s a superior officer, he doesn’t need to ask.  But he is; so she nods awkwardly. 

Cassian lowers his voice to a whisper; he sounds hoarse and urgent, and uptight, and confused.  “Are you trying to seduce me?  With – with this?”

His eyes are blazing like jewels.  He reaches into the breast of his jacket with his free hand and draws out a folded piece of flimsy.  Unfolds it to display a drawing of a rose, and lines of handwriting.

Jyn gapes.  Her own hand is shaking as she pulls this morning’s note from her pants pocket and shows him.  “But – but- I don’t understand.  You’re getting them too?”

The fire goes out in Cassian’s eyes.  He steps back, and the precious weight of his hand is gone from her shoulder.  She remembers the way he looked when K-2 said goodbye, that same shutting down inwardly of every window of hope.

“It’s not from you, then,” he says, and his voice is flat with control.

No.  No, this can’t be happening.  Don’t go away from me again.

She reaches out and catches hold of the strong right hand that is still withdrawing from her, and holds it and doesn’t know what to do with it next.  For a second their fingers intertwine.  Then he pulls back once more, almost roughly.

Hastily she pushes her own note at him, and in a gabble she says “I’m sorry, I didn’t write this, I would never have had the courage!”

 _You always look so fine/ You do something to me_ …  Cassian **is** looking fine, too, this morning; his clothes are immaculately pressed, boots polished, hair and beard trimmed and combed.  And in the silence after she speaks he looks at her with eyes that slowly take light again.

Jyn swallows hard.  She’s said too much now, and he’s a spy; in the face of his training she’s probably as obvious as a child’s story written in large type with full-colour pictures.  Too late to back-track, too late to deny it and claim it was a joke. 

And damn it, she won’t deny this, it’s too true and too precious to her.  If she’s given herself away now, well, she’ll just have to live with it.  Surely he’s too good to mock her for it?  Isn’t he?

Carefully, Cassian unfolds her note and compares it with his own.  As he reads, his eyes come back to hers at the end of each line. He says “Same writing. Same terrible poetry.”

“It’s just a horrible joke,” Jyn says.  “Some idiot’s idea of humour, using my feelings to hurt you.  I’m so sorry someone’s doing this.  I would never do something this mean to you.”

“It’s not mean…”  He moves closer again, bending towards her; his face is as open as a window suddenly and his voice drops to a husky whisper.  “I just – I wish it had been you.”

“Oh!...”  He can’t mean that, surely he can’t mean…  “You wish I wrote bad poetry?”

That gets her a tiny smile.

“I wish you wrote bad poetry for me,” he says.

Such an uncertain smile, Cassian has, away from his normal ice-cold professionalism.  He cannot have practised smiling very often in his life.  Hells and blazes, she thinks, he really does mean it. 

She has to swallow again, incredulity thick as tears in her throat.

“If I start to write poetry,” she whispers “It’ll probably be even worse than this.  Just to warn you.”

A tiny silence, a tiny quirk of a grin.  “I wouldn’t mind.  Not if it meant you cared enough to want to write it.”

“I do.”  Her voice has practically vanished.  Speaking hurts, but she drags the necessary words out.  This way at least she’ll die with them spoken.  “I do care, Cassian.  So very much.”

The shy grin grows a little stronger.  “So, when were you going to ask me about **my** bad poetry?”  He offers her back the borrowed note, and she wants to hide from the heat in his eyes; and to be consumed by it.

“I would never have dared ask, I knew it couldn’t possibly be you…”

He bites his lip.  “And that’s true.  But it’s only true because I would never have dared, either.”

“Oh…”

He brushes her hair back, lays his hand on her cheek for a second.  “I never thought you wanted me to.”

Something pushes Jyn gently in the back; she tears her gaze away from his and looks round, to see a short Drabatan behind her is trying to get to the memorial.  She and Cassian have been blocking it for several minutes.  She moves hastily, with a murmur of apology, but she raises her hand to keep his touch in place; and he takes only one step back for her two.  She’s practically in his arms now. 

And then she is, and he is in hers.

The warmth and strength of Cassian’s body against hers, the gentleness of his wiry arms as he holds her; this is freedom, this is home.  Jyn hardly moves, hardly even breathes, for the longest moment.   A year since she knelt in this same embrace and drew the courage to let her tears fall, looking at death and no longer fearing it.  A year since the sky burned, and Cassian stayed with her till the end.  A year since an X-wing landed and saved them, carried them out of doom, three people crammed into a cockpit barely large enough for one to stand up in.  A craft just like the ones mustering now, powering up their engines on the far side of the landing field.  The fly-past will be starting in a few minutes.

Behind them, the Drabatan lays a small wreath under Sgt Pao’s carved name on the Wall of Honour.  Salutes, silently.

It’s a day of mourning and celebration of sacrifice, and Jyn ought to be with her platoon, but she doesn’t want to leave the warmth of Cassian’s arms.  Not ever; never, never again.

She looks up at him at last, finally daring, finally hoping, and he bends his head and kisses her on the mouth.

And across the landing field, Flying Officer Rook, at the controls of an X-wing mustering for the air display, looks down and sees them melt into one another’s arms.  He grins to himself, satisfied.  Even poetry as bad as his has its uses.

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to find me on tumblr, I'm imsfire2...


End file.
